It was yet another stimulus for Indian teen chess as the country’s 15 year old chess prodigy R. Praggnanandhaa clinched the $12,500 worth title in the Julius Baer Challengers Chess Tour on 17 October 2021. While the victory helped him secure a spot in the Meltwater Champions Tour in 2022, yet another young player retained his title at the Junior Speed Chess Championship.
Can our brains be re-wired? Could we reboot the matrix of our mind and upgrade it to perform better? Psychiatric researches intended to study the neuroplasticity of the brain - "the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience," (Sharon Begley, TIME, 2007) - reveal that consistent mental practices help in reorganizing our brain patterns. And that is good news! What if our emotional responses could be controlled, behavioural patterns altered, and the entire thought process re-worked to make us better, smarter and productive individuals? Can our kids get less wimpy, grumpy, cranky and lazy with a few brain-tricks? Provokingly enticing!
Alzheimer’s is a chronic neurological disorder that is caused due to damage or destruction of brain cells. It is known to be a common type of dementia that can lead to memory loss, problems in thinking and hinders daily functioning of an individual. Every year in India, more than 1 million cases are registered concerning Alzheimer’s.
While symptoms of the disorder vary from person to person, but early onset of alzheimer’s starts in early to mid 30’s and a late onset begins in the mid 60’s. Scientists still have found out various stages and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. It starts with memory problems in the preclinical stage of the disorder. It then progresses to mild, moderate and severe stages.
For some people, chess is one such board game that leads them to anxiety and panic attacks. It would be wrong to deny the fact that, for some people chess is stressful. It is because a person can relate to real-life situations while playing chess. Though they know it is a game, it seems to be a real life representation of various strenuous scenarios they have come across.
Actually, it is the other way around, chess has numerous benefits, it helps you make better decisions, strategise, increase IQ, improve memory, enhance problem solving skills and it also comes with being patient.
A strong and sturdy plant speaks of the soil beneath; A soil that is well-ploughed, and watered; which breathes, replenishes and lets grow. The right soil does not merely give birth. It nourishes and sustains. Children are those saplings we plant with much hope and dreams. For them to nourish and grow into healthy minds, there needs to be a lot of digging around; a whole lot of watering and manuring, with patience and diligence.
The words of Dr. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist & author, seems quite applicable in the way our youngest generation is sprouting up. Raised in the lap of technology, Gen Z is all wired up in technology 24/7. The American Academy of Paediatrics reports that on an average, kids spend up to 7 hours a day on some or other random electronic device. The question is what do they filter and what goes into their brains?
Is your child a passive plodder who needs to be pushed around? Or is he/she a silent observer or perhaps a hyper energy-ball who requires some toning down? At Mind Mentorz we believe that the behavioral patterns of a child are closely associated with his or her mental development. We aim to season and temper the young minds in a magic pot of brain-games, channelizing their energies, creativity, and thought-process in a well-balanced and productive way.
Learning to code for kids is becoming increasingly common these days and one cannot dismiss the fact that it is a fast paced technological world and one needs to make complete use of it, be it to use them for convenience or use it to help kids learn the various skills much needed these days.
A relatively new topic for kids to learn, coding, as many people think, is no rocket science. As against the popular knowledge, young kids have an added advantage. Statistics show that kids learn coding faster, as compared to an adult. One can also view it as another language learnt another type of literacy.
It is a competitive world, yes, and though many may disagree, it is a fact and extremely necessary to keep yourself ahead of the competitors. Though it is definitely hard work which takes someone to their desired goal, a thought ought to be given to the young budding ones in our home and what the future holds for them, what issues would they face? Will the problems be the same as what we are dealing with or will it be different. Nevertheless, there can be no harm in preparing them for whatever comes.
Just like our body muscles require a physical workout to stay healthy, even our brain needs some mental exercise to work properly and stay healthy. Some people have a misconception that the learning techniques deployed by the schools are enough and it helps the kid’s brain stay active. But in reality, most of the schools are teaching the children to mug up information instead of understanding the basics of each topic. So can a brain develop by just memorizing things? Definitely not!
With the world becoming more competitive every passing day, school education alone is not enough to prepare the children for tomorrow. Schools do impart knowledge, but they don’t run programs to take care of students who face learning and focus issues. Moreover, school programs are not designed to enhance the children’s soft skills and development of survival skills. The need to thoroughly prepare children for the life’s survival race has given rise to many afterschool programs. Though a lot of parents enroll their kids in multiple afterschool programs to restrict them from wasting their after-school time in unproductive activities, they are not aware of the many benefits that an afterschool program delivers.
To cope up with today’s stressful and highly competitive world, people are planning to prepare their children from the early stages of life. A lot of parents have enrolled their children in yoga classes and several other programs to enhance the physical capability of kids, but there is one mistake that most of them are making. Physical fitness is essential, and it can be attained with the help of a gym, but what about the mental fitness? Isn’t it equally important? The word “fitness” is not limited to just physical health. Both emotional and physical fitness are required in equal proportion to become truly successful in life. Just like a typical gym takes care of the physical fitness of a person, the brain gym takes care of the mental fitness.
While we sleep, there are people in the nooks and corners of the world desperately carving their way towards excellence. Full of inspiring stories, visions and breakthroughs, they have this knack of looking at things from wider and newer perspectives. It may seem a bit of a cliché but these people have always asked why not instead of why and the result is the place they stand today in their lives.
At Mind Mentorz, we personally consider this post close to our heart mainly because of two things. Firstly, it brings to the light the inevitability of coding, its pros and influence on kids’ imagination and true inner potential. Secondly, and most importantly, it aims at bringing back the long-lost habit among the kids of today of picking up a book and reading it.
There is no denying that kids have grasping skills that cannot be compared to any adult. The sheer focus – regardless of the span – kids have on their task or work lets them quickly comprehend, analyze, interpret and solve concerns appropriate for their age. That is exactly why parents should go an extra mile in helping them inculcate new skills right from an early stage.
As we are slowly waking up to the importance of coding and programming languages here in India, a group back in the US realized the inevitability of coding as early as 16 years back. And this realization was not based on the scope of coding for adults but for kids over 8 years. Yes, MIT Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarden Group developed a visual programming language targeted at teaching coding to kids in 2002 that made its first appearance in the year 2007. Designed to help kids understand coding concepts and programming languages, the visual tool for ages 8 and above allows kids to think, analyze, collaborate and imagine a virtual world simultaneously learning digital concepts.
One of the major shortcomings our previous generation complained was on the inaccessibility to information. For them, everything was a struggle and they had to go on a pursuit to know things, adapt, work and evolve. However, that’s not the case with our generation and the ones to follow. At the click of a button, we have a world of information waiting to be explored and if you’re really into personal development for yourself or your kid, there are plenty of avenues and opportunities.
There were a total of 62 Participants in the 15th BNCF Chess Tournament that took place in BEL Officers Club, Bangalore. After a total of 7 Rounds, Manasvi managed to secure the 1st place in her category (U10) after she successfully managed to secure a 5.5/7 Rounds. The team at Mind Mentorz would like to congratulate Manasvi on a remarkable performance and wish her the best for her future chess tournaments.
Like any other game, you can become better at chess by constant practicing. This is an evolutionary game, where you not just learn newer ways of winning a game but evolve after every match as well. If winning in chess teaches you about your opponent’s mistake, losing can teach you yours. With literally several thousands of probabilities to the game, you cannot just come up with a pattern and device algorithms to tackle chess and win using a textbook approach. It takes constant development of skills including strategizing, consequential analysis, manipulation, grabbing the right opportunity at the right time and foreseeing actions to get better at chess.
64 squares and 32 pieces – it was all that it took for me to learn some of the most priceless lessons on life. They say anything could jus probable walk into your life and teach you some lessons that you will carry forward to eternity. For some it was humans in the form of relationships, money for a few, jobs and work for others, and books and experiences for the rest. But for me, it was the game of Chess. No institution, school or college has ever taught me things that I learnt from playing the game. Playing either alone or with an opponent, there have been innumerable epiphanies over matches and I made sure I wrote them down and interpreted them in a way that would help me evolve as a player and as a person.
